I laugh at the variations of nationalism involved, accounting for the historical variations is a complex area. Europe with a history of tribal warfare going back some thousands of years that still seems to be in play in the Ukraine. Before that smashing old Yugoslavia, civil war in Greece, WW2, Spanish civil war etc etc etc .... China is little better with a multi-thousand year history of warfare, the most recent being the Cultural revolution, before that the Communist revolution, WW2, Japanese invasion and occupation, the era of Sun Yat Sen, Boxer rebellion, a sequence of dynasties that displaced the one before it, etc etc etc ....
The comparison being made here is between individual gun ownership ALA the wild west versus state controlled gun ownership, both are nasty actions killing people for whatever reason and it is a difference of system, not result. Wars in a country (civil wars) are among the ugliest form of warfare, recent Yugoslavia, Spanish civil war, US civil war, historical European religious wars during the reformation and of course 3 thousand years of warfare in China all leave a mark in that society.
In China its national unity, in the US its freedom, Russia is still getting over the Teutonic knights occupation, Germany has assumptions of unifying all Germanic peoples and the list goes on and on. In Europe one may say "Thank God for the sensibility of the Swiss", legend has it that they absorbed the Knights Templars when the order was dissolved and they have tended to stay out of the general European tribal warfare ever since.
This range of variation across many different cultures is why the comparisons of gun ownership are often trivial, in the wild west, if you did not own and know how to use a gun, you did not last long. Now with some humour I contrast the land of OZ, for a young country (apart from the massacre of indigenous people) OZ has been politically stable since it was first settled in 1788. A bunch of pissed miners tried to start a fight at the Eureka Stockade but it was put down very quickly. Darwin was heavily bombed in WW2 but OZ has never had internal warfare and is historically a monoculture made of many different people of different origins.
We have a history of gun ownership but generally not for personal protection. handguns have been strictly controlled since the 1920s but it was not until the 1970s that rifle ownership started to be controlled, primarily for political reasons. There has been an ugly side effect though, since gun ownership was banned, we have seen a rise in police killing people as they are close to the only people with guns in society. Now elderly people risk being bashed in the streets because there is no-one to stop them, apart from police and the army, its mainly drug dealers and terrorists that have guns and instead of the historical rifle ownership, its often Uzzis and rapid fire rifles.
